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By Glen Sparer

Differing views of Stelarc’s performance art reflect two camps presently defining the digital divide of technology and technology based artwork. They manifest as the two forms of the technophiliac and the technophobe: the technophiliac with an excess of awe-stricken seduction for technology, and the technophobe obdurately dwelling in luddite-like fear and suspicion of technology. A technology always mirrors the libidinal desires made of the utopian dreams and fears of its milieu.

Enter Stelarc the Trickster, and it as trickster he must be seen. Every age has had its trickster, and Stelarc may very well be the best we aspire to in trickster-dom. Here, I define trickster as person, assemblage, or organism, which serves the social function of identifying the parameters of a social organism to itself. The trickster reveals and discloses a liminal threshold existing at the borderlands of culture, nature and machine. Out of many possibilities, our age has tended to generate liminal tricksters combining a strange amalgam of the natural and the artificial, as if suggesting these divisions were always arbitrary to begin with. They operate at extreme velocity in borders without signs, composed of discarded bits and debris of a human-animal-biological-machine interface. In Stelarc, we find reflected these mutant strains of the monstrous and the ultra-normal, the bizarre and the ordinary, the shocking and the clichéd, the showman and the charlatan. If the nineteen sixties found their ideal trickster in the figure and life of Andy Warhol, then surely in Stelarc, we come close to finding ours. Just as Warhol eroded the distinction separating art from display, consequently undermining the idealistic pretensions of the cultural sign, Stelarc celebrates the fetishistic body of technology, while undermining the very linguistic base of techno culture.

Linguistic binaries have always served as support of normative cultural regimes. Social and psychic stratification coagulates within an always already reflected second-hand awareness with language serving as binary support: I~ Other, the same ~ different, interior ~ exterior, nature ~ culture, patriot ~ foreigner, known ~ unknown. Stelarc’s performance work can be related to the philosophical critiques of the subject arising out of cultural and media theory of the late sixties. Structuralists and post-structuralists turned to the tools of Saussarean linguistics to critique a self-identical and reflectively transparent subject, preferring to locate the subject in a differential system of linguistic signifiers.

The common denominator linking Stelarc with a critique of the subject is a tactic of locating the subject within a differential system. While structuralists and post-structuralists continued to model social systems on language, Stelarc positions the subject within an extended physical apparatus, a ‘combinatorial’ apparatus made of diverse physical elements, ‘sensated’ by the body, yet approached by the mind. This recalls Deleuzian concepts of assemblage in which an a-signifying semiotics based in affective modes of expression, replaces signifying linguistic modes. The body becomes inseparable from the physical interface. A direct line runs from the body suspension pieces to the internet pieces in which multiple participants control and “ping” the Stelarcian body.
Early body-hanging pieces dating from the late sixties introduce an a-signifying scission of the body, cutting across language and culture. The body becomes liminal border and threshold, where physical body meets social and linguistic limits of name and form. Stelarcian bodies hang out at a border juncture between the realm of the senses, and the realm of culture. In these body performances, fishhooks are inserted into the flesh and the Stelarc body is hoisted up to remain suspended for a period of time. On occasion ‘the body’, as Stelarc likes to call it, is forced to conclude a performance due to loss of awareness. Each performance becomes less about the substantiality of the body, than an experienced recognition of limits.

In an exploration of subject-less bodies, the body becomes phenomenological apparatus, revealing itself as a hollow body, devoid of inner object selves. As hollow body, the skin is stretched taut across an empty shell. The body appears as a membrane to be permeated, penetrated or cut, first by fishhooks in the suspension pieces and later by titanium retractable devices swallowed and inserted into the stomach cavity from whence pictures are transmitted to computer screens where other bodies watch. Or perhaps the body is a data construct lending itself to be “pinged” by the data highway of the Internet.

As experimenter, Stelarc, having been both the observed and the observer from up close, declares the body a mortal thing, fragile and obsolete, doomed to obsolescence. As subject aware of bodily mortality, Stelarc seeks to supplement a fragile, temporal body with an accretion of technology, overcoming the mortality of existence with the immortality of technology. However, technology remains the most mortal and obsolescent of mediums.

we imagine ourselves to be, measured by biological, cultural and machinic destinies of our own construction. One can only imagine what the condemned prisoner in Kafka’s tale of the penal colony felt and realized, infatuated as he was, by the mechanical operation of the machine as it etched out his destiny across his flesh.